Joanna J. Bryson in Wired:
For many last week, their engagement with Google’s LaMDA—and its alleged sentience—was broken by an Economist article by AI legend Douglas Hofstadter in which he and his friend David Bender show how “mind-bogglingly hollow” the same technology sounds when asked a nonsense question like “How many pieces of sound are there in a typical cumulonimbus cloud?”
But I doubt we’ll have these obvious tells of inhumanity forever.
From here on out, the safe use of artificial intelligence requires demystifying the human condition. If we can’t recognize and understand how AI works—if even expert engineers can fool themselves into detecting agency in a “stochastic parrot”—then we have no means of protecting ourselves from negligent or malevolent products.
More here.